Global Media

From the website of leading tech visionary Joi Ito and the words of Thomas Crampton:

Joi Ito's Web: "Recently, an ex-FIFA sports official praised the French newspaper, L'Equipe, for some of it's hard-hitting doping coverage, including revelations about Lance Armstrong. But, he added, they just don't get the same notice because their reporting is in French.

His implication: If news is not in English, it didn't happen."

It's an interesting, persuasive theory. A great majority of the world's most frequented media sources do have at least some version delivered in English. I'm sure some sort of regression-based approach could be created to measure the tangible effect of lost readership and publicity due to a lack of English availability. Many of us simply don't understand Quechua, Croatia, or Bengali, yet we still thirst for news from such areas. This *does* limit us to the de facto world standard for so many other purposes: English. How much is lost? What is sacrificed when particular viewpoints and information sources are barred from the global public by lack of a universally intelligible source?